ft ground

Pouch Vardøgr 04, for Free Art Fridays

West Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

(Thank you again to Saucemaster Rex.)

Do you have a wake? You might check the rearview mirror in your car, or even the news for information about accidents, if you were afraid you’d caused one without realizing it. If the cuffs of your pants get wet, well that is the price you have to pay if you want to live in a world with consequences, you make choices and you live with them. That person laying under a logging truck or laying under a skidder, getting bit up by a mosquito, they are on their own path learning the lessons in life that are theirs to learn. Dave Mustaine learned all about that after the release of the phenomenal Rust in Peace. What else are you going to do? Work?

Nose was single brown hole sifting down to black in the depths of the head in a funnel sort of a cascade right down from leathery mummified gums and enormous wind-bleached and moonlit teeth lacking saliva that glitters for the living. This trustworthy face couldn’t cast shadows on itself. But as sand creeps it crept in tangential wavelets with leading edges like the hems of sheets being drawn across the sand and the face and feet begin to disappear in tomographic phases. Each wave was preceded by the telegraph of a shallow crunch through the mantle of the dune. The plods were far enough apart as to divide the rhythm into the dives of isolated desert creatures into the sand as the rising moon stole the cover of their night shadow, each separate and forgotten in a distinct world whose only cosmology is the distant memory of the last crunching sound which may or may not have been the fore-echo of a single escape. Each sang more perfectly the shape than the last, more imminent until they ceased altogether as much as an interrupted sequence can fool the reverberant surfaces to forget it. The moon at its apogee rang over the dunes without shadow, without error, trustworthy. The face and feet are gone. Only in the acceptance that flaws, even sunken, are enduring, and although in the flash of the believable homogeneity the body, or the feet and face, are now questionable, a hopeless breath-high sand geyser puffed and built a shallow crater above the repressed nose hole.

Did you hear what came from a lady in the darkness of the alley, seemingly swallowing so sickly since some silkscreen pair sank songs, and poor-lonely-immigrant songs up into brackish bliss. Did you think she would end up killing Mitch? Did you think she would have better control over her bloodlust? I for one always believed the possibly apocryphal claim that it was possible to be consumed and wrought up by shadows cast with no other frame of reference, such as a long-handled shoehorn form peeking out of the separate branches of alleys opening to pocket spaces. Greenery. I dreamed of a tree that handed down a tray of food to me whenever I was hungry and lifted me up into itself when I was in danger. It could smell and taste you, sense the beating of your heart or the electrical impulses generated by your moving muscles. It could speak in a way that closely resembles morphine’s waves. That night in the green room when It murmured to me, helped me think as I dreamed. I was wide awake before dawn, and as first light streaked the starry sky I heard the sound of ponies whose hoofsteps just erased all the walls and did the miraculous sifting of her form out in the middle of what once had been a garden. And she stood there as a teapot, which I thought was rather fantastic, and redeeming.

Roma, Firenze, (Pisa), Manarola, Venezia, Milano
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Kitty was walking with her mother and the Moscovite English Club, — she felt herself at home in a refuge of quiet. Emboldened by the wine, she started on her favorite theme, about hypocrisy and the way people act under times of hardship and pressure. Under pressure, people admit to murder, setting fire to the village church or robbing a bank, but never to being bores. They might not even admit to themselves that They had met you several times in the past and always gotten the impression you thought you were better than They. Yet it was They who unwittingly helped to lay the foundation for the brutal classless utopia of the Soviet Union. Such displays of aristocratic radicalism were the most trifling and irrelevant. Instead of crying and blaming the little black fish (for that is what she called them), Kitty wheeled and glared speechlessly at her mother, who was back down the road talking, laughing, and conspiring with a certain Mary Stouffer, known to be a radical scavenger agent and publisher of pamphlets.

When I finally arrive at UT I wander around to try to find Leach’s studio. From the foyer I see the glow of narcotic incandescent light washing into a long ambulatory. Only a gallery would spill that. It is silent in the after-hours. I have the sensation and trepidation of walking through a funeral parlor to a wake and seeing the pink saturnine light bathing the wallpaper from a side portal in the middle of the hallway and searching for an excuse to bypass it, to go spend time with mourners in the hallway, or to walk past without indulging in a glimpse into the room. A glimpse of the body casts moving, living memories in the crushed petals of a dry mauve flower, and dust. It introduces a lifeless dummy into their name’s evocation. Recalling their smile a brittle stitch-snapping leer arises; recalling an embrace I feel cold and satin. I had spent almost a solid eighteen months straight with Perry and then only saw him once for eight to ten hours since. I didn’t want to turn him into paper.

Even though I had seen him more recently, the way he haunts me is through the last time I saw him in Los Angeles. It maybe was mid-February, one month after my studies wrapped up. We had made plans to have lunch together. I met him at his house in Silver Lake. Instead of work my days were measured by the preindustrial drift of the sun. The shocking liberation of the days created such a monumentally sloppy month that seeing him again already felt like the seamless subduction of lapses in long friendships. We went to lunch at Fred 62 then back to his house to talk. Amy returned home and joined us in winter daylight and the white afternoon dimmed quickly. We lingered quite a while into the evening. Perry ran to Trader Joe’s and we cooked dinner and continued talking. In the first day of Perry’s studio he shared a truth with us that I remember in intent but not in phrasing. “As much as I will dedicate my time to you and your work, nothing will ever be as important to me as my own work.” This made faint sense to me until this night that I was able to engage Perry outside of our professional relationship. As I watched, somewhat separate, as though through the storefront at Fred 62 or the windows of the Kulpers’ house, his wasn’t a life passing or the drift of a pawn on capitalism, this too was an effort, a life project. Our free existence in this evening, merely living, was ‘The Work.’ I learned that there was work and ‘The Work.’ In the mind of a subscriber to the project of life, the wash of the senses was not a loss but a less filed amalgam, an impressionistic paste. ‘The Work’ was the critically detached, but retained, experience of life. The ongoing nature of the transformation of his life into his work caused the work to remain in flux by the moment. It seemed difficult to talk about, dumbed by an infinite buzz of voices like a tree in sun and breeze. His work drew people because it was alive as he lived. The paralyzing horror at finishing a piece or suite is overarching because it is the euthanasia of a string of memories. The unfiled sheet of mylar is the fulfillment of others’ idle wishes “that this beautiful day could last forever.” Coming from an academic setting where talking about one’s work was its realization, Perry’s indulgence in listening and the experiential vocality of his work characterized him more as a builder, a stoic practitioner, than an academic showman. Especially in the growing tendency of global culture to allow the unfiltered document of an experience to stand as an artifact, the physical transformation of a working life into something other than the original experience was an invitation more than the closed door of pastiche or capitalistic lifestyle baiting that comprised much of the rest of the decade’s work. Perry’s work became part of my life rather than a recognition that a life was merely occurring parallel to mine.

Of all that half-day’s conversation only the admonition that he left me with lingers, again in intent rather than phrasing. “Stay with your work, don’t let anything get in the way of it, there will be a lot of people and forces that see it as their right to change you or distract you, but you have to stay with it.” I thought, “of course I will, what could stop me on this journey?” But in retrospect, as I cast my eyes into the courtyard, I don’t see it as a call to take the vows, to eschew everything that didn’t express my thoughts directly in graphite on mylar, but a call never to relent in transforming all of those experiences into The Work. The things that get in the way should be digested; the things that feel warm on my neck should be admitted into the skein. Do not escape; indulge. It has been a rather crippling struggle. But when I sneak past the glass-walled gallery on to the stairs with an a nessuna cosa glimpse of drawings ranked, arranged, filed, their mineral eyes beginning to glisten, Perry’s admonition means something slightly different, “I am doing exactly what I want to be doing.”

On the first aerial toll-house, the cast body is questioned about the sins of the tongue. Say the word “Tarrasque” – now where did you put your tongue to make the “t” sound? The second is the toll-house of lies. You told him you would pay it back if he would just let you go. You know that the judge cannot allow you to go unpunished. The judge would be unjust. The third is the toll-house of slander. Jackie was not actually diagnosed with the disease. The fourth is the toll-house of gluttony. How much hair did you eat. The fifth is the toll-house of laziness. And still You lay there Jobless Masterring sloth Blind eyes Face thickening. The sixth toll-house is the toll-house of theft. Take nothing you won’t use. Consider any electrical goods. Will they work in the new country? The seventh is the toll-house of covetousness. You only wanted to be rid of the burdens of those bent beneath their loads. The eight is the toll-house of usury. That wizened man is lame and dry, His life now less than bliss, But what about that truth so wry: “As soon as a coin in the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs?” The ninth is the toll-house of injustice. You are an island, man, in your bones and you will have to beat it. The tenth is the toll-house of envy. Did you dream that you were wearing someone else’s clothes? Your dream may mean that you admire that person or want to adopt some of their qualities. The eleventh is the toll-house of pride. I’m not proud of what youve done but you cant change the past.. I want you to be able to tell me everything! you are my twin and I cant go a day w/out you. The twelve is the toll-house of anger. Raw emotion embarasses us, makes us turn away, and for heaven’s sake let it not touch our household. And why can’t there be “something else” besides the voice of machines speaking to us in the darkness.The thirteenth is the toll-house of remembering evil. He was in the shadow under the canopy he had set up to shield himself from the unusually hot April day, but a ray of sun caught his eyes, enough to let me see that they had committed grievous blunders. But there is no evil incarnate; no entity, no devil. The fourteenth is the toll-house of murder. You really just left town to get away from “someone”. You came back…you came through the door and said no you are dead. The fifteenth is the toll-house of magic. Do you feel like right now you are leaving leaving your body. You may sometimes hear sounds. I sometimes hear a “buzzing” or “vibration” sound. I have heard of others hearing a “whooshing.” You pay no toll if you are traveling to The Island; you pay toll only when going to New Brunswick. The sixteenth is the toll-house of lust. You have lusted for the new rain rather than humbling yourself by treating your brothers as vessels of the new wine. But you have rejected them instead. This time you may pass in silence. The seventeenth is the toll-house of adultery. You are fortunate to have died died a child. The eighteenth is the toll-house of sodomy. The goatse.cx lawyer has informed us that we need a warning! The nineteenth is the toll-house of heresy. Then be silent again for a little while. Silence is anything but empty! When you put yourself and your thoughts aside, you let God come into your awareness. No? ok lets continue… The twentieth toll-house is the toll-house of unmercifulness. That’s where I come in.

Did they call before the collapse? Are they really ok? Why don’t they call again? Did they hear the sighs and lamentations which rose up from the debris? Did they hear the three sections of the poem? Could you have said those things and pretended that the sand wouldn’t fill it also, it would never work the other way around, with your mouth singing so so freely THE SONGS OF SCOTLAND BEFORE BURNS as sung by the beautiful, and highly tuneful, the endless roll of the dunes. Did those songs call out for me? When I knelt to the ground, to listen for breathing, to watch the chest to see if it rises and falls, I discovered that it was entirely salt. I picked up a nice little hunk of it to bring home as an ideal free replacement for your spit and tears, unchanged, alike.